McAllister family

Trudie,

You haven’t said what denomination your family was but unfortunately none of the churches in Loughguile has any records for the 1700s, so tracing your ancestors may be tricky, if not impossible.

A little history about Loughguile here:

https://antrimhistory.net/civil-parish-of-loughgiel/

Some videos of the general area on that site too. Loughguile is mostly farmland with some forestry on the higher land.

Elwyn,

My family was Roman Catholic.  While I am disappointed they are so difficult to trace, I did enjoy reading about where they came from.  I especially liked the little poem about Loughguile.  Thank you for the response. 

Trudie,

Something I omitted from my initial reply. According to MacLysaght's “The Surnames of Ireland” McAllister (and it’s variant spellings) is “An Irish-Gaelic family in Scotland, a branch of which returned to Ireland as galloglasses in the fourteenth century.”  It was common in Antrim.

So what MacLysaght is saying is that the McAllisters moved to Scotland some time from 600AD onwards and settled there. Some of them returned in the 1300s as mercenaries to fight for the local tribes, in return for which they were given land. There was a huge amount of internal fighting in Ireland for centuries and it was common to encourage paid fighters (called galloglasses) to come from places like the Western Isles of Scotland, Argyll or the Kintyre peninsula to fight in Ireland when required.